Country music is in their bloodlines

Pam Tillis and Lorrie Morgan, daughters of Hall of Famers, come to town on their duets tour

Pam Tillis and Lorrie Morgan will come to the Ferguson Center as part of their… (Getty Images )

May 01, 2014|By Mike Holtzclaw, mholtzclaw@dailypress.com

Pam Tillis and Lorrie Morgan were born into the world of country music.

They are the daughters of County Music Hall of Famers Mel Tillis and George Morgan. They both grew up in Nashville and spent their share of time backstage at the Grand Ole Oprey. Both women have had successful careers in the industry and now – Tillis is 56 and Morgan 54 – they have been playing together on the Grits and Glamour Tour since 2009.

The tour pulled into Newport News for a show at the Ferguson Center for Performing Arts last week.

"We've been doing these shows together long enough now that we've really found a rhythm together," Tillis said by phone from Nashville last week. "I think the show is the best it's ever been. We've gotten to where we know how we want to do things, and it just feels really good right now."

Though the tour began almost five years ago, they did not put out an album of duets together until last year's "Dos Divas." Tillis said the album was a response to repeated requests from fans they would meet at their shows.

The two women didn't get to know each other as kids, but Tillis remembers hearing about the girl at a crosstown high school who was "just as ambitious as I was." That's when she began keeping an eye on Lorrie Morgan.

"Of course, she's stayed close to the country music world," Tillis said, "while I went off on various adventures into pop and R&B and rock and jazz, all hither and yon. But I was always keeping up with what she was doing."

They crossed paths from time to time, but they didn't become friends until the mid-1990s, when they went on tour with yet another country music legacy, Carlene Carter.

Tillis said growing up as the daughter of a country music songwriter was a truly distinctive experience. She has fond memories of her father coming home from the recording studio and singing her to sleep with whatever demo he had recorded that day.

"I was surrounded by it," she said. "He would walk around humming or singing under his breath, because that's how he would work on a song until he got it the way he wanted it.

"And now I do the same thing. I'm always humming my way through a song as I write it, because I'm always trying to get the words to sound conversational. That's always in my mind whenever I put pen to paper, or these days, fingers to laptop."

As she prepares for the show at the Ferguson Center, she finds herself thinking about a song that she didn't write – "Mandolin Rain" by Williamsburg's Bruce Hornsby, which she covered in 1995 with Marty Stuart playing the mandolin. She hasn't been playing it on the Grits and Glamour Tour, but that might be changing.

"I always did love that song," Tillis said. "It was never released as a single, but I do get a lot of requests for it. I've got to try to work that up so I can play it when I'm there in Bruce Hornsby country."